diversification of minds - conversation in processes
design for communities
Tokyo, 07.10 - 09.10 1999
Noriyoshi Osumi, NTT-communications, los altos, usa
Designing value-added services in e-commerce
In electronic commerce and likewise in multimedia education, it is important to develop effective designs for the mechanics of creating communities such as the matchmaking between buyers and sellers or the collaborative interlinking of students and teachers.
The Internet is a gigantic distributed information repository, which offers its users the opportunity to retrieve required pieces of information in a simple fashion.
It enables 'NxN' communication among its participants through its many-to-one-to-many connectivity. When designing communities, in the realms of business or education, it is important to consider these characteristics thoroughly.
Auction sites such as 'Onsale' or 'Amazon' are growing rapidly as commerce channels in business-to-consumer markets. 'Onsale' provides suppliers a new channel to sell closed-out materials and excess inventory without sacrificing limited resources such as shelf space, and it offers buyers not only opportunities to buy at great discount rates but also entertainment. Those sites allow its participants to make informed decisions on goods and services they trade, at the same time facilitating the creation of new start-ups in a market economy.
In business-to-business markets the need for supply-chain-management and procurement systems is growing. There will be a great necessity for centralized value added services, to develop effective design for managing trading communities. This includes change management, catalog management, and authentication and payment services. Catalog management for example should consider aggregating multi-supplier catalogs in a single user interface in order to create a buyer-centric shopping experience.
These examples provide good references for the required design mechanisms when creating communities and facilitating communication and transactions within these communities.
searching the vp7 database, you may find more about Noriyoshi Osumi:
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